FCPA/Anti-Corruption Developments: 2022 Year in Review

This past year saw an overall uptick of Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) enforcement actions against both companies and individuals in 2022 as compared with the prior year, although numbers were still far below their peak of a few years ago. Coordinated, multijurisdictional investigations and resolutions, however, have become an established feature of the FCPA docket, and the Department of Justice points to that as an important success for enforcement. The Department also continued to stress the importance that it places on individual prosecutions and, indeed, in 2022 brought more FCPA cases against individuals than in the prior year; pursued other foreign bribery-related prosecutions against a number of individuals under anti-money laundering laws; and re-emphasized in the Department’s written enforcement policy that a company that hopes to receive cooperation credit must, among other things, provide fulsome information to the Department that would assist it in pursuing individuals.

This past year also saw new and significant DOJ enforcement policy announcements reflecting the Department’s continued efforts to incentivize companies to disclose voluntarily FCPA and other corporate white collar criminal matters, and to cooperate fulsomely with government investigations. For its part, the SEC was active in 2022 with respect to FCPA corporate enforcement, bringing four matters jointly with DOJ and three SEC-only matters.

Finally, the Department of Justice continued to emphasize the subject of corporate compliance programs, including by building in additional obligations related to compliance programs in corporate resolutions; further augmenting the Department’s Corporate Enforcement, Compliance, and Policy Unit (CECP); and emphasizing in various policy statements that independent compliance monitorships, which had declined in number in recent years, remain an important tool in appropriate cases from the Department’s perspective. It is also worth noting that the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division, the head of the Fraud Section within the Criminal Division, and the head of the CECP are all former Chief Compliance Officers (CCO).

In this Year in Review, we discuss these developments, as well as key developments and trends in the international arena with respect to anti-corruption enforcement and also compliance standards. We will be closely monitoring activity by both US and foreign authorities in 2023.